Why Waiting Is the Enemy of Progress (And What Elon Musk Taught Me About Moving Anyway)

You're waiting. Waiting for more time. Waiting for the market to calm down. Waiting until you feel "ready." I've done it too — for years, actually, with a book I kept telling myself I'd start once things settled down. Things never settle down. That's the trick waiting plays on you.

This isn't a pep talk about hustle culture. It's about something simpler: progress, real or imagined, is the thing that keeps us moving. And waiting is the fastest way to kill it.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Being "In Progress"

We love saying we're "in progress." It sounds active. It sounds like something is happening. But a lot of the time, in progress is just a nicer name for stalled.

Here's the test: if you can't point to something specific you did today, you're not in progress. You're in waiting mode, wearing progress as a costume.

That's not a moral failing, strugglers. Waiting feels safer than moving. Moving means you might fail, and failing where people can see it is scary. So we wait for a better plan, a clearer sign, a calmer week. The waiting feels productive because it's full of thinking. But thinking isn't progress. Doing is.

What Elon Musk Understood About Slow Progress

I'm not here to build Elon Musk into a saint. He's a polarizing guy, and reasonable people disagree about plenty of what he's done and said. But there's one thing about how he operates that's worth stealing, regardless of what you think of him: he treats waiting like a cost, not a comfort.

Look at SpaceX's early years. The company's first rocket, Falcon 1, failed three times in a row between 2006 and 2008. Three times. By the third failure, SpaceX was reportedly close to running out of money completely (source: SpaceX Stats).

Musk didn't wait long. SpaceX scraped together spare parts for a fourth rocket and launched it weeks later. It worked. That single launch, in September 2008, is widely credited with saving the company — and a NASA resupply contract worth $1.6 billion followed soon after (source: Space.com).

That's the pattern that shows up again and again with Musk, for better or worse: a bias toward doing something, even something small and ugly, over waiting for the conditions to be perfect. Tesla's brutal "production hell" with the Model 3 is another version of the same story — a slow, humiliating process that only moved forward because the team kept building and adjusting instead of pausing to wait for a smoother plan.

You don't need a rocket company to use this. You need to notice where you're doing the human version of waiting for a better funding round — waiting for motivation, waiting for the new year, waiting until the kids are older.

Making Progress Beats Waiting for the Perfect Moment

There's real research behind why forward motion matters so much psychologically. Harvard Business School researcher Teresa Amabile spent years analyzing nearly 12,000 diary entries from people at work. Her finding, now known as the progress principle, is that the single biggest driver of a person's motivation and mood isn't a bonus or a compliment. It's making progress on work that matters to them, even in small steps (source: Harvard Business Review).

Small steps count. That's the part people miss. You don't need a launch, a book deal, or a big reveal to feel the lift. A rough draft counts. One email sent counts. One hard conversation counts.

Waiting removes even that. When you're stuck in wait-mode, there's no small win to feel good about, because nothing happened. No step, no signal to your brain that you're capable, no evidence to build on tomorrow.

The Real Cost of Waiting

This isn't just about mood, either. Waiting has a measurable cost on your body.

Researchers who study chronic procrastination, which is really just a fancier name for professional waiting, have found it's linked to higher stress, worse sleep, and more physical symptoms like headaches and colds over time (source: British Journal of Health Psychology, 2023). One long-running estimate suggests around half of students and 15 to 25 percent of adults procrastinate chronically enough for it to be a real pattern in their lives, not just a bad Tuesday (source: Durham University).

The stress usually isn't from the task itself. It's from carrying the task around unfinished, day after day. Waiting doesn't lower the pressure. It just spreads it out over more days.

How to Get On Progress, One Small Step at a Time

You don't fix this by deciding to "stop procrastinating" through sheer willpower. That rarely works. What works is making the next step so small that waiting takes more effort than doing.

•      Shrink the task until it's almost insulting how easy it is. Not "write the report" — "open the document and write one sentence."

•      Set a timer for 10 minutes. Most resistance breaks in the first five.

•      Track what you did, not what you planned. A short list of done things beats a long list of intentions.

•      Let it be bad at first. A rough version in progress beats a perfect version that never starts.

•      Forgive the slow progress. Slow progress is still progress — it's not the enemy. Standing still is.

None of this promises a transformed life by Friday. It won't. But it does something more reliable: it gets you unstuck today, and today is the only day you actually have any control over.

A quick story, for what it's worth

This is a real pattern from my own life, not a documented case study — take it as one person's honest experience, not proof of anything universal. For almost two years, I told people I was "working on" a small side project — a consulting practice — every time someone asked. In reality, I hadn't sent a single email. I was waiting for a logo, a website, a moment when I'd feel ready. The week I finally sent one plain, unpolished email to a former coworker asking if she needed help, something shifted. Not because the email was good. It wasn't. But it was proof, for the first time in two years, that I was actually making progress instead of just talking about it.

FAQ — Quick Answers for Strugglers

What does it mean to be "in progress"?

Being in progress means you can point to something specific you did recently that moved the task forward. If all you have is a plan or an intention, you're not in progress yet — you're waiting.

Why is slow progress still progress?

Because momentum compounds. A tiny step today makes tomorrow's step easier, and research on motivation shows even small wins lift your mood and drive to keep going (source: Harvard Business Review). Slow beats stalled, every time.

How do I stop waiting and start making progress?

Shrink the first step until it feels almost too easy, set a short timer, and do that one small thing today. Don't wait for motivation — action tends to create motivation, not the other way around.

Is waiting always bad?

No. Deliberate pauses to plan, rest, or gather real information aren't the enemy. Waiting becomes a problem when it's driven by fear or perfectionism instead of a real need, and it stretches out for weeks with nothing to show for it.

Two Books Worth Your Time

•      The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — the research behind why small wins matter so much, told through real workplace stories.

•      Atomic Habits by James Clear — a practical guide to making the next step small enough that you actually take it.

Your Turn, Strugglers

So — what are you waiting for? Not the rhetorical kind of question. I mean it literally. Name the thing. Then take the smallest possible step on it today, and tell me about it in the comments. I'd genuinely like to know what you're making progress on this week.

And if this hit home, stick around. There's more like it here for people who are done waiting.